Categories
Family Vacation

Really love the new Camera

d5500For the Guadeloupe trip, I bought a new Nikon D5500 camera.  Our old camera was a Nikon Coolpix 5400 that was 12 years old, 5mb pixel camera.  The D5500 is a 24mb pixel with two lenses.  The primary lens is a 18-55mm Nikkor DX.  The zoom lens is a 55-300mm Nikkor DX.  This is a big upgrade from the old coolpix, which served us well.

The new camera has a built-in wifi feature that allows a smartphone to connect to it.  From the smart phone you can view the images on the camera and you can trigger the shutter.  Remotely triggering the shutter is great for taking long exposure photos.

I took this picture of the moon from our balcony on Sunday night.  Using the 18-55mm lens set to a focal length of 24mm.  The aperture was set to f/3.5, the shutter speed was set to 2 seconds and the ISO was set to 1600.  I used a tripod and the remote trigger from my smartphone.

 

I took a similar picture on Friday night without the moon. I used the 18-55mm lens set to 24mm.  The aperature was set to f/3.5, shutter speed was 5 seconds and the ISO set to 400.  I also used a Cokin 8 point star filter to add the starburst effect.

 

 

Categories
Family Vacation

St Anne and St Francois

On Sunday we toured the towns of St Anne and St Francois.  The towns are about 20km apart and both are on the ocean.  We also drove out to the tip of Grand Terre island, Pointe des Chateaux.

St Anne is a small but up beat town.  The main street has plenty of shoppes and street vendors.  There are plenty of places to eat.  The food is a combination of traditional french cuisine and creole.

 

Streets of St Anne:

St Francois is a sleepy town with minimal shopping. The food in St Francois is outstanding.  The center of St Francois is the harbor.

Categories
Family Vacation

Ask for the check???

Our first night we went out for dinner.  Cathy and I do not speak French.  However MJ is able to hold a brief conversation and Jill knows a few words.  Never realized how bad the language gap would be.  I figured they would speak some English.  Nope.  Notta.

We ate at a restaurant, Kamate, just outside the resort.  Dinner was excellent.

After dinner Cathy and Jill went back up to the room while MJ and I finished our drinks.

I asked MJ to get the check.  He spoke to the waitress asking for the check.   The waitress looked at him weird and asked him his age.  He told her that he was 19, but he was asking for me because I didn’t speak French.

The bartender walks over to the table about 5 minutes later.  He hands me a double shot glass.  I look at MJ and asked him what did he request.  He says he asked for the check.  “Obviously not” was my response.

At first the smell reminded me of a single malted scotch.  I’m thinking this could cost me anywhere from $8 to $30 depending on the scotch he ordered.  As I tasted the drink, it was very smooth.  I started to get worried that this could be a after dinner cognac and it could be more than the $30.

I drank 1/2 of the drink.  MJ finished the remaining 1/2.  Yes, the drinking age is 18 in Guadeloupe, so MJ could legally drink.

After we finished are surprise drink, I walked up to the bar to speak to the bartender who could speak some english.  As I paid the bill, I found out that the shot MJ ordered was a $6 Jack Daniels.  Whew.

We are still not 100% sure how the waitress thought we wanted a shot of Jack Daniels instead of the check, but the next day we did make sure to find out the correct way to request the bill.

Categories
Family Vacation

We’ve Arrived at Guadeloupe!

gpcaribWe arrived in Guadeloupe on Saturday, July 4th. Guadeloupe is a chain of Caribbean Islands in the lower Antilles, part of the West French Indies.  It is actually on the South American continent.  The kids can boast they’ve been on 4 out of the 7 continents.

There are two main islands and 4 smaller islands making up Guadeloupe.  The two main island are Grand Terre and Basse Terre.  The 2 main islands are connected via bridge.

We flew out of Philadelphia and had a transfer in Miami.  The flights were very smooth and on time.  We landed in Point-A-Pitre about 20 minutes earlier than expected.  The first thing we noticed is the immigration and customs procedures are very European.  The islands are very French and the euro is the currency.  I told Cathy this is not a vacation, its going to be an adventure!

Our resort is in the town of St. Francois on the island of Grand Terre.  It is about a 45min drive from the airport.  The second thing we noticed is the 2 main islands are much larger than we originally thought.  Its a solid 2 hour drive just to cross from one end of Grand Terre to the other side of Basse Terre.

We rented a car for the week, which always adds  adventure.  It s a small Chevy Captiva with a manual 6-speed transmission.

 

Categories
Family

Jill has Started Mowing the Lawn

Yesterday I taught Jill how to use the ride on mower.  After an hour going over the mower and teaching her to operate it on the driveway, I turned her loose on the grass.

 

 

Categories
Family

River Lady Cruise

After Jill’s 8th grade graduation, we took a dinner cruise on the River Lady paddle wheel out of Toms River, NJ.

The scenery was fantastic.  Got some nice pictures of the setting sun out on the water.  Nice to sit back relax and spend time with everyone.

 

The one piece of excitement was s sever thunderstorm which came through area.  The captain pulled the paddle wheel over to a dock and tied up to ride out the storm.  The thunderstorm passed in about 30mins.  In that time the wind and waves were really kicking up.

Photos of the River Lady

 

Growing Up

On Tuesday, June 23rd, our little girl graduated from Junior High.  Next year she will be attending Middletown South High School.

In 4 short years she will be off to college.

Photos from the day.

Categories
Jetski

Jetskis on the Navesink

MJ & I rode the jetskis on the Navesink on Sunday, 6/14. I used “My Tracker” on my cell phone to record the trip. The jetskis are older machines and I’ve always wondered the speed and distances we travel on them. Using “My Tracker”, we know exactly how far and fast we are going.
Yesterday we traveled 15.8 miles. The max speed was 48.09 mph and the average speed was 18.35 mph. The river was choppy with a lot of wake from other boats. It was a challenge to avoid the waves and get the skis moving fast. But it was fun to jump the wakes.

Categories
Technology

Hard Drive Bites the Dust

On Thursday, March 26th, the 1.5Tb hard drive in my primary development box bit the dust.  Based on the diagnostics and sounds emanating from the drive, I believe I had a head crash. My first thought was “Oh no, when was the last time I backed up the data”. After a mad scramble I realized I could recover everything up to a point 2 weeks prior to the crash. Not bad. Could have been much worse.

My second thought was “Ok now what do I do with the machine?”. The machine is a few years old, but still has a lot of life left in it. It has an AMD 6-way processor with 16Gb of ram. I have been toying with the idea of using a SSD drive to speed up the machine. Just could never bring myself to take the plunge and rebuild the box from scratch.sandisk_ssd

I decided to purchase a 256Gb Sandisk SSD drive and a traditional 3Tb Seagate Hard Drive.

On my dev box I like to run Linux. Usually its one of the Fedora versions. Rebuilding the box, I decided to go with Centos 7.0 distro. The production websites that I have running are all on Centos 6.5 and it was time to start solifying on a common distro.

After researching the best partitioning method for SSD drives, I ended up putting the “/” and “/boot” partitions on the SSD. The “/swap” and “/home” partitions went on the Seagate drive.

Obviously I don’t have a way to benchmark the performance improvements with this set-up, however anecdotally, I do notice applications are very quick to start up and respond. Interestingly when I retrieve data from the network, there is very noticeable delay in getting the data. That is with a 1gb nic. With the old setup I couldn’t really differentiate between the application start up delays and the network delays.

Overall I very happy with the end result. If you have a box that is “mid-life”, installing a SSD drive can definitely improve the performance. Also this has reinforced the requirement to backup regularly.

Categories
Family Technology

Lost and Found My Phone

Samsung S4

Last night I discovered my phone was missing.  I knew I had it on the bus coming home.  In the house I realized it was not in the holster.  After searching the car I figured it was somewhere on the bus.

Cathy called the bus line to find out the bus was heading back to NYC for another run.  We thought that if I was lucky I might get the phone back in a couple for days.

I use Sprint’s family locator app to track the where abouts of MJ and Jill.  Actually I track their phones and because they would never separate from the phones, I can reliable find them.  The family locator app sends periodic messages to all the phones that I have tracking turned on, so Cathy and the kids all know that I can track them.

After getting off the phone with the bus line, Cathy turned to me and asked if I could track the phone with that software.  I had MJ install the family locator software on his phone and configure it to track mine.  We then spent the next 2 hours watching my phone travel up the turnpike, into the Port authority bus terminal and back down the turnpike.  We quickly called the bus line to find out the route the bus was taking and the stops.  Turned out the last stop was in our home town, Lincroft.

As we watched the bus travel, MJ and I drove over to the bus stop.  We had to wait only 5 minutes for the bus to arrive.  The bus line sent a text to the driver that someone lost their phone on the bus.  As I approached the bus, he was fully aware of  why I was there.  The phone was resting nicely between the wall of the bus and the seat.

The only downside was that before we started tracking the phone, I had started to look at the new Samsung S5.  Guess now I’ll have to wait a year before I upgrade to that phone.

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